


Thirteen Portraits of Winter

by bawolf01



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, But not too far, Deviates From Canon, POV Bucky Barnes, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-20 22:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18132944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bawolf01/pseuds/bawolf01
Summary: My take on how Bucky made it back to Steve after the events of The Winter Solder.





	Thirteen Portraits of Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Basically after TWS I was left with the burning question, "Wait, what's going to happen to Bucky now?" so I answered it. I wrote this immediately after TWS was in theaters, but before we knew anything much about Civil War, hence the slight canon divergence.
> 
> No smut, but there is implied Steve/Bucky love. Love can get you through a lot, it turns out.
> 
> This format of vignettes strung together like lights on a string is inspired by Neil Gaiman's "Fifteen Portraits of Despair," which is a brilliant chapter in his book "Endless Nights." It seemed to fit well with the fractures in Bucky's memory and psyche.

**One:**

It has been months since the explosions and the fight. Months since he pulled his mark out of the freezing black waters of the Potomac and left him gasping and bleeding on the shore. Months since he started running.

Months since he started trying to put his mind back together.

The seasons have gone from hot and muggy summer to freezing winter, with ice storms and blizzards and frozen streets and alleys.

His mind is also frozen. He chips away at the conditioning in his thoughts and instincts like a block of ice, trying to break it down. It is cold and it burns. It is _everywhere_.

 

**Two:**

He always looks down alleys as he passes. He doesn’t know why. It’s a habit he cannot break. Sometimes he stops and stares down the empty alleys

_i'm with you till_

and has to shake his head to clear it of the ghosts. Then he walks on through the cold, hunched in his jacket.

 

**Three:**

Winter grips the city, and there are plenty of shelters open each night, some small, some big. Most are safe but some are scams, fronts for prostitution or drugs or worse. He quickly learns which shelters to avoid, which shelters he has to get in line for, which ones fill up the fastest. He quickly learns which administrators to avoid, not to trust the lockers, that the homeless in America are as victimized as helped by the “resources” that are supposedly there to help them.

He keeps moving from shelter to shelter, never staying at one more than a couple of nights in a row. It’s too risky, people might get too familiar with him and wonder why he always keeps his coat and gloves on, even when he’s sleeping. The compulsion--the _directive_ \--to hide his arm is strong. Primary. He does not fight it. He has more important battles to fight.

 

**Four:**

Hiding in the bushes. Watching in the cold morning. Two men running in the park, their breath puffing out in clouds of steam.

"On your left."

"You gonna say that every time?"

"Yup."

They race past his hiding place, laughing. He leaves.

 

**Five:**

He can't always get hot food from the shelters. Sometimes he is too far back in the line and they run out before he gets his turn. Sometimes he loses his place when he refuses to fight for it.

He eats a lot of kid's foods. Junk food. Spaghetti-Os. Nutrition shakes that taste like chocolate plastic. Cheap cereal. Candy. Sweet, sweet soda that makes his teeth hurt, not like the way Coca-Cola used to taste back before...before... _before_... _**before**.. _.

Before.

One day for lunch one of the volunteers at the shelter gives him an apple. He smells it and realizes he loves apples. Such a simple thing. Such a tiny thing. It slipped past all of the barriers, all of the traps, all of the black holes they put in his mind. A tiny and brief shard of identity, so small: apples are his favorite. He takes a bite and the crunch and sweet juice and it tasted so good like the sharp fall frost on the way to school and it was almost like back before before _before **before** **BEFORE**_

Darkness then, roaring.

 

**Six:**

He is used to the dark cold that comes in his mind, that whips through him like a freezing black wind. That erases who he is like snow driven off a clean sidewalk. He is used to being cold. He weathers the storms when they come, trying to hold on to something. Anything.

 

**Seven:**

"Wow are you like Iron Man?" the little boy asks him when he sees the arm.

It is late. He thought everyone in the shelter was asleep before he opened his sleeve. It was such a minor repair, it was only going to take a minute...such bad luck.

And then the directive is there, the compulsion to _neutralize_ anyone who sees his weapon when he is in hiding. He tries to fight it and feels the black wind howling, roaring...

When he's done he finishes the repair and goes back to sleep.

 

**Eight:**

"On your left."

"You need to stop."

 

**Nine:**

A String of Pearls.  Moonlight Serenade.

He sits on the bench and listens to the concert in the shopping mall. It’s warm in here, he came in to get out of the cold. It’s during the week and aside from a few seniors dancing in front of the orchestra hardly anyone is here. The music washes over him.

Rhapsody in Blue.

It doesn’t stir anything in him, but for once he stops constantly scanning and assessing the people around him. He closes his eyes. He just listens to the music as it flows through the air and around him. A precious moment of peace.

Then the security guard (age mid-50s, 183cm, 95 kilos, range 15.2 meters, limp from damage to left hip and knee, Beretta 92FS on right hip, S&W .38 snub-nosed revolver in concealed back holster, knife or baton concealed in right boot threat minor close distance and kick at hip to take down then throat to kill) starts to watch him and he leaves.

 

**Ten:**

Hot lunch at the shelter. Sitting at a table by himself, not looking at anyone. Nobody likes to sit with him. He’s fine with that.

"Mom," the little boy at the next table says in the overly-loud way that young children whisper, "Mom, mom...mom! That's the guy who's like Iron Man in his arm. Only you have to not tell anyone though it's a secret."

The boy's mom glances nervously at him, but he stays hunched over his soup, pretending not to hear. "Hush now. Hurry up and eat your food, you don’t want someone to take it. And don't forget to save some of your roll for breakfast, you hear? There might not be anything."

Small victories are sometimes the best.

 

**Eleven:**

He is being watched.

He can feel the eyes on him. His nerves ratchet up a notch, and then again, rapidly. He hunches down in his coat and walks faster through the cold winter late afternoon. Turns into the alley

_again? don't you know when to_

and hides in the shadows and waits, looking back the way he came, and then _she_ is there, in the opening of the alley, silhouetted in the cold fading afternoon light, her red hair an angry halo. He is scared of her.

After barely a second she moves on. (Maybe she was just passing by? Was she even there?)

His hand is shaking with adrenaline. He wills himself to be calm. The eyes are gone, he is alone.

He waits until full dark--nearly five hours--before he even moves.

 

**Twelve:**

_HE_

_IS_

_MY_

_FRIEND_

He holds on to that single terrifying thought, a single thin strand like fishing line, like a hot wire burning as it whipsaws through his mind, desperately holding on as the freezing darkness comes to wash it away.

_my friend_

 

**Thirteen:**

"On your left."

"We gonna do this every time?"

"Looks like it."

This time...this time he steps out into the open. The two men are still several yards away. The see him and stop running, staring at him with wide, cautious eyes.

_He is my friend._

He stands in the open, his hands out and visible. And then behind him he can hear _her_ step out of hiding too. Mild surprise in the back of his mind; he didn't even know she was there.  He glances back and she looks at him and he sees in her tired face...something. Not pity. She doesn’t have a face built for pity. Something else. Understanding, maybe.

He recognizes the fatigue in her, the exhaustion of someone who has been on the trail of a target, and suddenly in a flash of understanding he knows what’s been happening: she's been following him for days, sometimes losing him but always picking up his trail again--and he only knew it that one time. He can see that she is tired and running on caffeine and cheap street vendor food and too little sleep because she wanted to keep an eye on him.  Because she was the only one who could actually track him. Because...

Because _he_ had asked her to. His friend had asked her to.

And he knew then that they had known he was out in the city, moving from hiding place to hiding place, trying to rebuild himself and hold on against the dark wind. They had just been waiting for him to make the first move, to show that he had beaten the darkness. Or that it had beaten him.

"Bucky?"

He turns back around.  His friend is still standing there, everyone afraid to move, to break the tableau.

"Bucky," his friend says again, his voice breaking.  His adam's apple bobs as he swallows hard, trying to speak. There are tears on his flushed cheeks.

_Steve never cries, not even when he gets beaten up, why is he crying now?_

And the memory comes all at once, sweet and full, as if it were always there, as if the conditioning and barriers and black wind were gone: he remembers running up the icy alleys years ago, centuries ago, forever ago, **_before_ ** , seeing a block away Steve getting gut-punched by some thug, racing to get to him before the knife comes out, the freezing air burning through his throat and lungs. The thug sees him barrelling down on them and takes off, sprinting and skidding on the ice around the corner. He finally reaches Steve and helps him up and even through his heart pounding in his own ears he can hear the breath rattling in Steve’s chest as the asthma grips him and robs him of air. Then Steve starts to shake, and he remembers the fear in his eyes, and the anger (nothing makes Steve Rogers mad like his asthma, his _god-damned_ asthma, the only thing he’s ever sworn about), and he grabs him and holds him tightly, and at first Steve resists but the shakes get so bad his legs give out and he just holds on as best he can. He feels Steve’s body full against his, shaking harder than you would think possible for someone so frail and he wishes he could give him his strength and instead he just talks to his friend in a low calm voice, his mouth next to his ear, _don’t worry I have you I’m not going anywhere you can make it through this we can make it through this I’m with you till the end of the line buddy just listen to me ok now breathe that’s it breathe in for three that was good almost had it just go slow try again breathe in for three there you go now out for five_ , talking him through the attack, focusing him, calming him down, and gradually feeling the shakes finally stop and he can breathe again. He relaxes to release Steve but his friend holds on tight, tighter than before, warm, and he responds and holds him back hard and there is a moment of rising heat...but then Steve lets go and he lets go and maybe it was his imagination, and they walk home close together through the dark, through the cold winter night.

_I talked him down from a dozen asthma attacks, and now look at him, jogging in the goddamn freezing cold like it’s nothing._

He looks over Steve’s shoulder at the other man and sees only understanding there, too. Empathy. No threat. They knew. They knew he was coming here, watching them. He hadn’t fooled them at all.

"Hey man, you look hungry," the other man says. "We were gonna get some breakfast, you want to come?"

He thinks deliberately on it. He knows he's not safe yet. The darkness is still there, howling on the edges, waiting. But right now, right this moment, he has won.

"Yes," he says simply. "I want to go someplace warm."


End file.
